AT&T Takes Steps to Join the Filtered Crowd

by the oracle on November 14, 2007 at 5:54 pm · Comments
Categorized by General / Related Information

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AT&T has made another move away from net neutrality today, by investing in a little known company called Vobile.

Vobile’s main product is something it calls VideoDNA. The product produces a ‘watermark’ for every frame of video content, and is said to be very durable, surviving all manner of transformations.

The problem is not so bad because of the filtering of copyrighted content - no one seriously thinks a claim can be made to allow piracy - but the filtering technology just needs a little tweak here and there to eliminate the type of content AT&T decides is ‘bad for us to receive’.

Since AT&T owns much of the Internet backbone, a few well placed filters could really mess things up for many who depend on P2P applications to transfer legitimate content.

(Since this is a major way of distributing open source software, and specifically Linux distributions, it is not such a far stretch of the imagination to think Microsoft may just have a small hand in this.)